News Archive: Max April 2007

Last week I helped my 17-year-old brother-in-law build his own
computer. Moo, as I shall call him, as I have since he was
four, is not particularly geeky. He is what they
call emo. And he lives in England, so all I could do was give
advice over the phone and hope I wasn’t about to hear, “Is
this bit meant to be smoking like… OH MY GOD IT’S—beep, beep, beep.”

But he put the whole thing together with no real dramas or explosions,
which I was very impressed with. Then we got to what turned out to be
the hard part: setting up Windows XP.

I haven’t used Windows much in the last three years. It’s
possible that my mind has become clouded by the religion that is
Linux. But I don’t think so. I think Windows has gotten crappier.

I seriously can’t believe how many hoops you have to jump through now to do
even simple tasks, like upgrade Internet Explorer. (Before
you are permitted to plug the gaping security holes in the 2001
version that comes on the CD, you must install
some
other software that’s of no
benefit to you, which requires much
clicking, restarting, and rebooting.) The Internet Chat program,
Messenger, is so crammed full of ads and promotions that it’s
hard to work out where the non-commercial content is. Programs
crash. Installing drivers is click-and-hope. It won’t recognize
your wireless network card because it wasn’t invented in 2001,
and you can’t go on the internet for updates because it won’t
recognize your wireless network card.
Even if you could,
you don’t have any security patches installed,
and by the time you download them, your system will be infected with Sasser.
Everything you install tries to change your home page, start by default,
and fill your desktop with icons.

But what really bothers me is
the feeling that you must constantly fight for control of your
own computer, because your aims are apparently in conflict with
those of Microsoft and half of everyone else who writes Windows software.
They want your
computer to report information
about you, keep ongoing watch over what you’re doing in case you
turn pirate (activation, registration, and validation?),
show you ads, and lock you out of protected media. If you lose this
battle, then six months later you find yourself with a computer so
clogged with malware that the only way to make it usable again is
to reinstall the operating system and begin the fight again.

Occasionally I see articles about whether Linux is ready to
compete with Windows on the desktop. But it’s become obvious to me
that Linux is already a
better operating system. That’s purely
on the merits—features,
reliability, and ease of use—and even before you throw in the fact
that Linux is free and has more accessible support.

So to me the question isn’t whether Linux is good enough any more.
It’s down to the applications: whether Linux programs are
available to do everything you want.

Today the latest version of Ubuntu
was released. Ubuntu is the best home Linux distribution going
around, so if
you’ve thought about switching, it’s a good time. You can
download
a Live CD, which lets you try Linux out without actually
installing it, but even better might be to consider
which
applications you could switch to. If you can find
Linux versions that do everything you need, you’re good to go. If you
can’t—and there are
certain
holes here that will rule Linux out for some people—then
you might want to stay put. (It is possible to run most Windows
applications on Linux with emulation, but it’s clunky. And
dual-booting for anything except games gets tedious fast.)

P.P.S. I understand that to many people, Linux users are fanatical
freaks with no appreciation for the basic fact that the majority
of the world doesn’t fall in love with computers but simply
uses them to get things done. But that’s because they’re running
Windows. If only they switched, the scales would fall from their
eyes and they too would realize that they are eating delicious
cherry pie while everyone around them chews on mud, saying, “It’s
not too bad, once you get used to it.”